Diplomats are supposed to be subtle and clever. Australia’s just leaked 1,000 citizens’ email addresses Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has just exposed personal details of over 1,000 citizens in an email. Australia has all-but-closed its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, rationing the number of citizens who can fly into the country each day. That policy means the few airlines still flying sell …
you would imagine that by now the interface/training would have changed to stop this.
With exchange someone knocks up a group for convience and as it shows a single entry on the "to" field so they go ahead like they would for internal message but since it is going out vias SMTP the email has each recipient rather than just the group name on the "to" line.
MS fail due to showing their own dialog rather than a specific one for SMTP where the user could see who is getting what.
Even a question box saying one of more recipients is going to have the full mailing list are you sure? would be enough
The email package is irrelevant - people misuse lists from list servers just as often.
Government agencies do not value IT training, and so you have an endless stream of these basic failures in digital competencies. They also fail to appear on mandatory reporting lists for such breaches.
Sorry, but we have decades of evidence that training and 'are you sure' simply don't work. People are too busy thinking about what they are trying to achieve to give any thought to the software that they shouldn't have to know much about.
What might work is for the client side to not accept more than one address in the To or CC fields, only BCC. I suppose there are use cases for allowing people to 'Reply All' but that should be extra work. Not the default. (Hey, that solves another stupid email abuse issue. A Toofer!)
Being a rules engine isn't what people are good at. We have these new-fangled computermabobs for that.
I'm not an expert on Exchange, but I believe you can set a limit, although a distribution list only counts as one. You might check out the below link for details.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Exchange/mail-flow/message-size-limits?view=exchserver-2019
"Diplomats are supposed to be subtle and clever. "
Casting every employee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as a "diplomat" is a little misleading. This is old fashioned administrative ineptitude by a peon and not at all like, for example, our ambassador to Eastasia naming all his sources risking their detention, imprisonment, or worse.
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